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Library Book Of The World

Nobacon raises the rogue flag and sets the sails aflame with a rousing set of riot-folk and heretical sea shanties.

Full Description

Avast!, ye merchants of despair, ye captains of industry, ye free-market colonialists! There’s a fearsome mistral kicking up the sails, a gale that carries spectral voices from the edge of civilization, a tempest that will sow your ruin! Danbert Nobacon hears the insurrectionist call that the winds bring, and considers it a directive. A captain on an outlaw ship, a Magellan in a sea of manufactured dissent, on Library Book Of The World Nobacon raises the rogue flag and sets the sails aflame with a rousing set of riot-folk and heretical sea shanties.

Library Book Of The World catapults Nobacon into uncharted seas armed with all the tools of his trade, as longstanding member of the infamous anarchist collective Chumbawamba, and discovering new tricks along the way. Channeling the revolutionary fire of a proud lineage of conscientious agitators, Nobacon describes his role on the album as that of a “psychic medium plugged into the mainline of human history, hearing voices from present ghouls and future ghosts as well.” The result is both a self-contained manifesto and a companion to Smart Lies, Secret Wars and Rock 'n' Roll, a history and current affairs book Nobacon is currently writing.

On Library Book Of The World, his first solo album in over two decades, Nobacon dredged up a motley crew of shipmates in the Pine Valley Cosmonauts and embarked on a long-distance voyage through the wreckage of history, setting a course for a future in which contemporary society crumbles about us. The veritable rogue’s gallery that is the Pine Valley Cosmonauts—old friends and fellow pint-hoisters Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers), Alan Doughty (Jesus Jones, Waco Brothers), multi-instrumenalist John Rice, drummer Dan Massey and accordionist Pat Brennan—joins Nobacon to kick up menacing refrains, ushering in the extinction of heedless environmental degradation and the multi-tentacled kraken of globalism.

Nobacon is the mad captain at the helm, wielding an oil can in one hand and a lighted match in the other, hearing the sea change coming in the wind.

Short Description

The album’s 15 tracks whirl with a storyteller’s keen sense of language and plotting, but Republicans and evangelicals might not get the joke.

— Illinois Entertainer

Nobacon is one man who walks the anti-establishment walk, and his forceful words and rough, beefy music should remind us that there are more problems out there than the 6 o’clock news lets on.

— City Life

On The Library Book Of The World Nobacon establishes himself as a prominent genre hopping solo artist and brings that musical depth of his previous act and pushes it into the forefront.

— Cashbox

It's great, politically-charged piece of rock'n'roll powered by Mekon Jon Langford and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, who give a wonderfully ramshackle, spontaneous feel to it all.

— All Music Guide

... smart satire, poetic lyrics and quick and often humorous wit makes him stand out in a now chorus of political songwriters and commentators around the world. The style casts him as part of the older political dissenter, like Phil Ochs, which to be honest we need far more of these days. And it seems like we got just what we need in Danbert Nobacon.

— BrokenDial.com

The Library Book of the World is a rambling, ranting menace of a CD, tackling more issues than you can shake a pint glass at. Coming off like a cross between Tom Waits and the Pogues’ Shane Macgowan, Nobacon can probably both drink and argue you under the table...its warped sea shanties, smashed roots rockers, bitter ballads and motley laments, is just the kind of musical manuscript you need as a roadmap (or posthumous archive).

— Bullz-eye.com

Nobacon borrows heavily on Tom Waits' formula and reemerges as a grumbly, razor-witted miscreant armed with a dirty sound that's like a country-rock outfit jamming with Satan's own string quartet...Half wiseacre and half wise man, Nobacon's satirical and political edge rescues, if not quite defines, this album.

— Aversion.com

... a series of unhurried and magnificently realised compositions that combine his left-field roots, classic country, Tex-Mex, gnarly blues and jazz and fuses it together into a great big engrossing whole. It's also just happens to be the most vital thing he's ever done.